More on the WMD hunt:
Quote:Britain and the United States have bypassed the United Nations to establish a secret team of inspectors to resume the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. [..]
No banned weapons have so far been found.
The decision to set up a new group of inspectors, dubbed US-movic because they are an American-led rival to Unmovic, will infuriate the UN.
Kofi Annan, the secretary general, pointedly reminded Britain and the US this week that Unmovic still has a mandate to carry out inspections.
Last night the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, added his criticism by saying that war against Iraq was a foregone conclusion months before the first shot was fired.
In a scathing attack on Britain and the US, Mr Blix accused them of planning the war "well in advance" and of "fabricating" evidence against Iraq to justify their campaign.
Mr Blix told the Spanish daily El Pais: "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the [weapons] inspections." [..]
A spokesman for Mr Blix, Ewen Buchanan, said the US-led team had tried and failed to recruit some of his staff.
Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, said the existence of the secret team would lead to a major dispute. "You are more likely to find what you want if you do it yourself," he said. "If this team finds a smoking gun, people will not believe it."
I also wondered about another quote from this article.
Quote:A cabinet minister has told the Guardian that Saddam Hussein's failure to use chemical weapons was not an indication of their absence. They had been dismantled and their contents hidden around the country.
"The regime has not had time to reassemble the things," a British official said.
"You will not find a factory of gleaming missiles," a source said. "They would have been broken down ages ago."
Now suspicions that Iraq still
had things it shouldn't have were pretty widespread - thats why the UN weapon inspectors were there, in the first place. There were two points about not granting the UN any of the additional time it requested to find these things, however, I seem to remember.
One involved an acute danger to world security, that the continued status quo could not safeguard against; a danger that the US, after 9/11, had full rights to act against if it deemed the danger imminent enough. Yet apparently whatever illicit materials Iraq did have, were so far removed from usability in WMD that Saddam's state is now said to not have "had [the] time to reassemble the things" during the weeks of run-up to the war and the three weeks of war itself.
If the UN weapon inspections at least, apparently, had forced the disassemblance of the illicit materials into parts unusable for offensive action within any short time, how imminent can that threat really be said to have been, and how desperately unsuccessful, as the Bush gvt claimed it to be, the UN containment policy, when it came to WMD?
The second argument that came up in that last rush for war, I believe, involved claims that there had been delays enough and Iraq should come up with the various materials or proof of the materials' destruction pronto. The suggested ultimatum was, I believe - nine days? Seven? A proposal of the "minor" SC countries for an extended ultimatum of a few weeks was swept off the table as irrelevant.
Yet now, apparently, the lack of WMD use in the war is because even the three+ weeks in question hadnt been enough time for the regime - even when its very life was in danger - to reassemble any of these things. How realistic, then, can that last ultimatum for them to come up with the goodies be said to have been?
